Disney’s Streaming Service Is Called Disney Play, Will Cost Less Than Netflix

The streaming landscape will shift significantly in 2019 with the introduction of Disney’s very own service. Although the full details about the site and its offerings are still unclear, a new report in Varietydoes lay out a few specifics, including the name of the service (at least for the moment) and a rough estimate of what it will cost and stream.

Per Variety, Disney CEO Bob Iger calls his company’s streaming service “Disney Play,” and its big initial selling point will be the company’s 2019 theatrical releases, “including Captain Marvel, Dumbo, Toy Story 4, The Lion King, Frozen 2 and a new Star Wars installment.” As for the price, Iger says you can expect to pay “less than Netflix’s $8-14 monthly fee”:

Disney is counting on the exclusivity factor of selected Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and Disney-branded properties to drive interest in the service. Iger has acknowledged that the Disney Play price tag will be less than Netflix’s $8-$14 monthly fee — a reflection of the lighter content load. ‘We have the luxury of programming this product with programs from those brands or derived from those brands, which obviously creates a demand and gives us the ability to not necessarily be in the volume game, but to be in the quality game,’ Iger said.

As the father of little kids who are starting to discover the old Disney classics, that’s what I’m most interested to see on here. Disney has always been very strategic about what movies they do or don’t offer for sale at any point, keeping many of them locked away in the so-called “Disney vault” and then offering them on home video for a limited time. Will they use that same model for streaming? Will old films or shows rotate in or out? Will they offer movies that haven’t been available for a long time? Forget the new stuff; for a lot of people, those archives could be the most attractive part of the sales pitch.